Last Sunday, Canada’s public broadcasting network, the CBC, aired a segment on the radio examining the recession’s effects on women in Canada. Not surprisingly, the effects are quite similar to those women will experience in the U.S.

Listen to the podcast: CBC Radio One — The Sunday Edition February 15th, 2009

Host: Karen Wells

Guests: Kathleen Lahey – Professor of Law at Queens University, founding editor of the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, and author of report: Budget 2009, Designed to Leave Women Behind Again.

Ann Decter – Director of Advocacy and Public Policy for the YWCA, Canada’s largest provider of shelter for women and one of the biggest child care providers.

Summary:
85% of jobs lost in January were full-time positions held by men, but women have been losing full-time jobs for several years, and replacing those jobs gets very low priority, compared to the stimulus aimed at men’s jobs. Since 2005, women have lost 15.2% of all the full-time jobs, while men have lost only 2.8% of full-time jobs. The gains women had made in workforce participation are disappearing. More women are working part-time, without unemployment insurance or childcare. Women are 47.7% of the workforce, but 90% of stimulus jobs will go to men. There is a perception that women are edging men out of the workforce, because men are losing more jobs now, but in fact the opposite is true: men are still perceived as the primary breadwinners, and women as secondary workers. There is no provision for social infrastructure projects like education, health, social services, community recreation – all of which serve to stimulate the economy and strengthen the community. Changes in unemployment insurance rules make it harder for women to collect benefits. There should be a national childcare program. Childcare was readily available during World War II, and was rapidly dismantled as soon as combat was over. Canada currently ranks 83 out of 157 countries for it’s efforts to achieve gender equity. It ranks behind all EU countries, and all of the OECD nations. It ranks behind Israel, Cuba and Venezuela.

Transcript:
Karen Wells: This week, the recession — it’s not going away any time soon – we wondered if men and women are going through the same recession.

As the recession deepens it becomes increasingly apparent that no one from Bay Street to Baffin Island is going to get out of this thing without being affected somehow.

Canada [pop’n 33 million] shed 129,000 jobs last month. It’s not a good time to be in the auto industry, the forestry business on the West Coast isn’t doing so well, either, neither is trucking, or construction, or furniture making, or computers, or electronics. Given the kinds of jobs that are disappearing, perhaps it’s not surprising to here that 85% have been jobs that were once held by men. In fact, if this trend continues and it probably will, women will soon outnumber men in the workforce All this to say that recessions, like any economic development, effect men and women differently.

KW: Is this recession different from other recessions that we’ve lived through? I don’t mean in severity, but is it typical for men’s jobs to disappear at a faster rate than women’s?

Kathleen Lahey: It’s quite typical in the sense that this recession began for women several years ago, and to put the focus just on what changes that have taken place in the last month or so, really misses the real picture and misses just exactly how vulnerable women have already become because of the way governments in Canada have responded to the impact of earlier recessions on women.

Ann Decter: Definitely the impact on women started several years ago. The current numbers that we’re seeing are very much concentrated in male dominated areas, but we’ve been bleeding in Ontario and Quebec manufacturing jobs since 2002, really, and that’s 30% women, not 7% like trades and construction.

KW: You’re saying this recession began for women several years ago, but we didn’t call it a recession then.

KL: That’s right. I don’t think that any attention was paid to this at all. Between 2005 and this current year, women have lost 15.2% of all the full time jobs that they have had in Canada. So far, during that same period of time, men have lost only 2.8% of their full time jobs. So what has in fact been happening is that the slight gains women that had made in gaining access to full time employment have been severely eroded, leaving women even more concentrated in part time work going into the recession, with severely impaired access to Unemployment Insurance and to any form of safety net, such that the impact on them is really what should be of concern, not that there is some risk that women are going to somehow dominate the workforce.

KW: That is though what’s attracted the attention — that image of that some people have called the “lipstick economy.”

AD: What you’re looking at is 47.7% of the workforce is women, anyway, and that’s based on 2006 figures. So the idea that it’s a male workforce and women are taking it over, I think it’s a huge mis-framing — that men are breadwinners and women are not. Women are breadwinners; everyone works, and that’s the way we need to look at it. So when we have a stimulus package that’s highly concentrated in construction we are stimulating jobs that are over 90% held by men.

KW: The key word in here is “full-time” jobs.

KL: I think it is, and I think that sheds some important light on why a story could be constructed out of an image of men “losing out” to women in the workforce. I would describe this storyline as a distortion of the reality that is out there, because if the rate of gap-closing that has momentarily taken place between women and men were projected out into the future, perhaps in 20 years women would become equally represented with men in full-time employment. But that’s only part of the story. The more important part of the story is that women’s work has been now very significantly part-time, marginalized, increasing numbers of women have to work more than one job, work seasonal jobs, or casual or even off-market jobs.

AD: At minimum wage, a woman anywhere in Canada is living at the poverty line. If she has a child or two children, she’s below the poverty line. And if she is among the estimated 30% of women who pay into UI (Unemployment Insurance) and then have a chance of actually collecting it, she’s going to collect 55% of that. There’s this huge focus on this sudden loss of jobs in male-dominated industries, whereas we’ve had this long term situation for women — with the development of precarious work, with the narrowing of UI eligibility — that really needs addressing and we see nothing happening.

KW: Is there anything different happening now, or is this a continuance of the same issues that both of you have been talking about for some time?

AD: I think it is in general a continuance of the same issues, what we are seeing though is a sharp acceleration in some fields. As I said, Ontario and Quebec have been losing manufacturing jobs for years, but with current conditions — the collapse of the economy essentially in the United States — you’re seeing an extremely sharp decline in those. It’s almost like an exaggerated moment, and I think at least in part because everything comes through banking and the stock market where everything gets magnified. The stock market is essentially just a magnifier of feelings: you saw it bounce up and down all Fall. So the same trends happen, but they are very accelerated in the present moment.

KL: I think I would take a slightly different perspective. I see this as a perfect storm that has taken place and it is going to be affecting women quite profoundly and in ways that we may not be able to predict at this point. The perfect storm is really made up of generations of how Canada has responded to prior recessions with the continued focus on full-time employment, standard employment, and acting as if the male breadwinner is really the important actor. Part of the problem that women are facing right now with the low access to Unemployment Insurance benefits that Ann just outlined a couple of minutes ago is due to the fact that as part of the so-called recovery from the recession that took place in the early 1990’s when a very large number of women did in fact gain access to Unemployment Insurance benefits, Paul Martin restructured the Unemployment Insurance rules to the point where they not only generated a huge surplus that was allocated to pay down the deficit that had become enlarged during the recession, but which has ever since then put women on the margins in terms of getting unemployment insurance benefits now. So one piece is that the safety net that was there for women during the early 1990’s is gone. The other piece of this perfect storm is that the budget that has been accepted by the Liberals has nothing in it for women. I mean, nothing. They’re basically being left out.

KW: When you say women, often as not, it means women and children. When the safety net goes, it’s women and children for whom the safety net goes.

AD: Oh, sure — 40% of the children in low-income families are living in families led by single mothers. This is where a huge amount of poverty is concentrated. And this is why it’s a travesty that we don’t have a national childcare program. That is what women need to get children taken care of, get out of the house and get to work. If you’re a single mother at home on an appallingly low social assistance rate — that’s the other part of that perfect storm that Kathleen’s talking about: that social assistance rates across the country were really dropped in the same period from the late 90’s on. They are not livable, and so women and children are concentrated in poverty; single mothers are concentrated in poverty. One in three families led by single mothers is living in poverty, and the supports are just not there. The decimation of the social safety net has hit women very hard and now, in a time of need, it really is not there.

KW: Ann, your organization, the YWCA, is front line. You’re dealing with people coming through the door. Any financial pressure in a family isn’t good for families. People crumble. There’s terrible social upheaval. What are you seeing?

AD: Certainly there are studies out there showing that rates of violence against women will increase as family stress increases. What I’m hearing from our member associations across the country is they want employment programs for women, they want non-profit childcare. They want money put into that. Again, that’s the big hole in the federal budget – there’s not a word in there about childcare — snd the fact that the budget didn’t seem to understand that social infrastructure is a way to stimulate. Social infrastructure is education, is health, social services, community recreation — all these kinds of programs that are more needed in times of recession, but at all times hold communities together, help to build communities. These things we saw almost no investment in, just a small bit for First Nations.

KW: How important are you seeing social infrastructure to be?

KD: Tremendously important. We have good examples from past history that demonstrate that when governments recognize the true value and importance of women’s labour – not just in the domestic sphere, but also in paid work – that it’s very easy to set up extensive childcare resources. This happened during World War II in order to support women in the ways that they needed to be supported during a very unique period of time. But at the end of World War II, that childcare support was cold-bloodedly removed by the federal government in order to make room for men in the paid economy after the cessation of armed conflict. This recession has the potential to have somewhat similar effect on women.

KW: You mention WWII, Kathleen. There was a sense then – you know that Rosie the Riveter kind of thing – that great pride that women can be strong and put on dungarees. Those are the photographs and the poster that are being reproduced now.

AD: Well, I think that there was a certain propagandistic element to that which was designed to help overcome existing social attitudes, and now I do sense that there is a social expectation that if women have to work, it should be fitted into the gaps and spaces around the standard employment model that is still expected of men and expected for men. The figure that always stuns me is that at the present time based on the most recent statistics that we have the average income that women can expect to earn in Canada is between $25,000 and $26,000 per year. The average income that men earn is $45,000 a year. That’s a tremendous gap.

KW: And yet, the numbers I read about higher education indicate 132 bachelor degrees for women to 100 for men. 160 master’s degrees, to 100 for men. Women are better educated, so why doesn’t that play out?

AD: I think some women are better educated and some women are able to take advantage of the changing society, and access education, and when you look at labour force participation rates with higher education there’s a very small gap between men and women, but if you look at labour force participation for those that have just completed grade nine, men participate at twice the rate of women.

KW: How does this fold back into the recession, because again, we’re talking about things that we’ve been talking about for a long time.

KL: It folds back into the recession in the sense that it may be that it is hard work to keep looking at gender issues, but two things need to be kept in mind. First of all, the international community has been for several years now extremely critical of how Canada is doing in relation to women. And secondly, because this is creating an intensified set of circumstances, this can have a devastating effect on women. So it may be that some people really wouldn’t want to have to be talking about this again, but that’s a luxury that Canada cannot afford. I’ll just give you one example of why I’m saying this: the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, which is made up of the 30 most industrialized countries in the world, has recently published a report that says that women’s entry into paid work, albeit heavily in part-time, etc., work, has been the mainstay, and they use the words, “the mainstay”, of Canadian income growth in economic terms, in Canada.

KW: So we’re talking about community development, not just women’s development – of benefit to the nation?

KL: Women are an extremely important part of the economic engine that is Canada, but at the same time, the OEC had been very critical of the government’s continuing refusal to tax women more fairly, to provide childcare, to provide housing assistance, etc., to help make this less onerous for women.

KW: Let me just raise one other point with you – at the recent meetings of the international financial community in Davos. I gather there was discussion there about the issues that got people into this recession in the first place, about the behaviour of Wall Street and those companies that dominate Wall Street, and one of the points that was made was if there had been more diverse decision-making, be it young and old, racially different, male and female, this would have led to better decision-making. And Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times went so far as to…I think someone facetiously suggested that perhaps the bailout should have a provision that for every $100 million, the bank should guarantee one woman on the board. Is this a valid point to make – that this could have created a better economic situation?

KL: Yes. Absolutely. It is well-accepted in a number of other countries. One of the problems with Canada is that it seems to be falling more and more under the spell of U.S. exceptionalism which makes continuing sex discrimination a point of pride. Specifically, women are tremendously under-represented on corporate boards and in important decision-making positions, including in Parliament in Canada. Countries such as Norway have actually passed laws demanding parity – or not parity – 40% of all members of corporate boards should be women, and have done this on the basis of decades of studies demonstrating that the whole approach to decision making and the values that are considered along with presuming profits definitely change as women gain a meaningful voice in institutions.

KW: Because up until now it’s been seen as an issue of fairness – that it’s only fair that there be the same number of women as men.

AD: Really, it’s an issue of knowledge and it’s an issue of point of view. Not every woman holds the same point of view, and not every woman holds the same point of view and not every woman comes to the table with a more equitable sense of how to do this. You’ve got to be competitive to rise to the top in business whether you’re male or female. There are studies out there that, for example, in a parliament, that if you hit around a 30% level of women you will start to see a change in the kind of decisions that the government makes, and that will be around what I was talking about in terms of social infrastructure, what we generally think of as social services – things that are really nation-building rather than building concrete objects or transportation — but education, social services childcare. They tend to say if you can hit 30% or higher you start to get to see more of those programs coming into being and a shift in the general sense of government.

KW: And you live in a generally healthier country all around. Kathleen, do have anything to add on that?

KL: I do, and I think it’s a slightly expanded point, and that is, the World Economic Forum, which held the meeting in Davos along with other organizations has been tracking how every country on the globe has been doing in relation to pursuing equality for women, and it may well be that one of the problems that we have in Canada is conceptual, because between the Charter, and the fact that Canada was ranked number one in te world for four years in a row in the mid 1990’s in terms of pursuing women’s equality issues, I think that many people are unaware of how badly women’s situation has deteriorated since the beginning of this decade. The figure I would like to just flag is a new measure developed by the United Nations called the Gender Disparity Index, where Canada has recently been ranked number 83 out of 157 countries, as well into the bottom half of countries pursuing equality in relation to gender. What this number 83 means is that countries with low levels of development, countries with low incomes, countries with different governance structures – they’re all ahead of Canada. Not only is Canada the lowest-ranked of all the OECD, the industrialized countries, but Canada is ranked lower than countries like Cuba or Venezuela in terms of the attention that the government is paying to making sure that women do not fall into the very second class status that they have had for so much of the history of this country. The real message of being number 83 out of 157 is that all of the OECD countries are ahead of Canada significantly; all of the EU countries; most of what are called the mid-development countries such as Israel – all are way ahead of Canada.

[segment continues with brief discussion of Canadian reaction to budget analysis]